The Slowest Machine in the Room

Windows 8 was a disaster in the way only Microsoft could engineer—confidently wrong, expensive, and releasing an update that reportedly bricked machines. Against that backdrop, someone selling a Nintendo Famicom cartridge loaded with a functional version of Windows XP started looking less like a novelty and more like a reasonable alternative computing strategy.

The thing actually ran. You could open the calculator. You could play a few games. No high resolution, no internet, no 3D anything—just the old interface humming along inside a cartridge that was already ancient when XP launched. There’s something almost philosophical about it: a thirty-year-old piece of hardware faithfully hosting software that itself feels like a relic now. The cartridge sold on eBay for around eighty euros, which is either a tremendous deal or an elaborate joke, depending on your relationship to nostalgia and functional computing.